Since the history of man, people are making constructions of all kinds. In order to make constructing easier, a construction was divided into elements. These elements were standardized to make production easier. Examples of this standardisation are, for buildings for instance, bricks for building a house, beams and roof tiles, and more recently concrete parts like floor panels, windows, but also doors and other parts of a building. This concept of standardized parts is also used for other types of constructions, like cars, computers, and, in fact, all industrially produced constructions.
A problem with most of these elements is that they require handling. Furthermore, the elements are used for a specific construction, or a specific use, like toys. Furthermore, often the known elements are not reusable.
In “Reconfigurable group robots adaptively transforming a mechanical structure”, by Yousuke Suzuki, Norio Inou, Hitishi Kimura, Michihiko Koseki, Proc. Of the 2006 IEEE/RSJ, Oct. 9-15, 2006, Beijing, China, “group robots adaptively construct a mechanical structure” are described. “The feature of the robots is high rigidity by adopting sliding mechanisms. [.] discussed algorithms of crawl motion and adaptive construction considering mechanical constraints of the robots. The proposed algorithm is based on local communication of the robots. [.]a scheme of a temporary leader which is autonomously specified by form of the structure. The scheme decreases amount of information in communication between the robots.” A proposed motion module allows only a limited mobility of the proposed robots.